Foreign News: The Insider

In their frustrating and interminable war in Algeria, where cruelty
answers cruelty, and heroism has its ugly necessities, the French have
found one continuing source of solace: the dramatic exploits of a
tough, leathery colonel named Marcel Bigeard. The son of a railway
mechanic,
Bigeard was a humdrum bank clerk in Toul when he was called up just
before World War II. Today, a weatherbeaten and wiry 41, he is a
legend.

Bigeard first made a name for himself as a sergeant in 1940 when he held
out in a Vosges dugout five...